You can’t hope to get a whole person on the page—other people are always the biggest mystery, the great unknowable in life—but you can sometimes get down in words that thing that makes them strange and alluring.

We knew that we were going to have the fairy tale world as a backdrop in Puss in Boots, we wanted to make sure we didn’t end up just parodying them. We wanted to take the original stories and put a new spin on them.

European folk tradition has placed quite a strong emphasis on the connection between the shadow and the soul; this connection can be found in German and Portuguese folklore, and in non-European folk belief as well.

From the Editor

I wanted to start with the idea of the origin story. Every writer has one, and it’s always interesting to hear how writers of color navigated the choppy waters of reading fantasy early on and then deciding to write it. I remember searching for myself, in that languageless sort of way we do when we’re young and don’t know the larger meaning of our search.